A few weeks ago I went apple picking. There is just something so satisfying, twisting the apple off the tree and placing it lovingly into your bag. Crunching on one or two as you pick. And watching the dog eat the rotten cores lying on the ground.

Sometimes there are too many wonderful choices. Do I pick Cortlands for the pie, Jonathans because they can be cute and juicy, or Golden Delicious because they're not red? Or maybe I even go over to the vines adjacent to the orchard and pick grapes for jam.

And that's how I felt today looking at all the exciting announcements:

Today IBM announced new Storage Systems that are designed to increase efficiency and are optimized for workloads such as Transaction Processing and Analytics. The extensive list of storage innovations announced today builds on technology such as IBM System Storage Easy Tier software, which was invented by IBM Research and can improve performance significantly by automatically moving active data to SSDs.(1)

Today the IBM Power 795 achieved the highest result ever published on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark. The 128-core Power 795 handled 79 percent more users than a 256-core Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 (Oracle's largest system) and over 1.8 times more users per core than a brand new HP DL980.(2)

Today IBM also announced everything from a new version of PowerVM with industrial-strength virtualization to IBM Smart Analytics System enhancements to a new Power 740 8-core server.

That afternoon we picked 32 pounds of apples and made two batches of apple rings, an apple pie, apple slices -- and squid in red wine sauce without apples. I was exhausted -- but I'm hoping to make it to the orchards this weekend because I surely can't miss the Melrose.

Sources: www.sap.com/benchmark, http://www.storageperformance.org. Results current as of 10/7/10.

SAP, mySAP and other SAP product and service names mentioned herein as well as their respective
logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries all
over the world.

In a study I read about this week, it appears that working actually provides an important component of the environment that improves cognitive functioning. In other words, the earlier you retire, the more quickly your memory may decline.

The good news about this finding is that the more we analyze benchmark results, the better it is for the health of our brain.

Oracle published a TPC-H 3TB benchmark last week on the Sun M9000 using Oracle 11g. What amazed me was that Oracle would actually compare it to an IBM result when the IBM Power Systems result was clearly 1.5 times better performance per core than the Oracle result.(1) And that doesn't even take into account the fact that:

The Oracle result had an availability date in 2Q11 while the IBM result was from 2009.

The Oracle result was on a brand new system while the IBM result was on a POWER6 system, not even on a POWER7 system.

The Oracle result used Oracle Database 11g Release 2.0.2, not even available yet. The IBM result was a proof point using Sybase.

Stunning is a word we usually reserve for a new swimsuit. A diamond ring. Or Grace Kelly.

Not a word we would apply to a grey box.

Oracle's newest advertisement for its "stunning" Exadata system this morning makes extraordinary claims of query performance from "one customer." Who is that customer? Oh, OK Larry, so you can't tell us. Then what industry is it? What type of application? What data? The ad screams "hardware and software." But exactly what hardware and software was run and compared to what? Remember that devil in the details.

If you're going to make claims on a system that you haven't even put forward in an industry standard benchmark, then you surely better be thorough about it.

And you might be careful about using the word stunning in this context. Unless of course you mean it to have its other meaning - capable of causing, or liable to cause bewilderment or a loss of consciousness.

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